


snow in my pockets

by maggierachael



Series: little and broken (but still good) [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, ManDadlorian, Modern AU, and cara's his long-suffering partner, and poor baby is sad so get ready for some serious emotional dad dyn feels, dyn accidentally becomes a dad on a drug bust, dyn is a cop because of course, like you do, of course she did, oh look maggie wrote another mando thing inspired by a dessa song, this is the start of a whole universe of bullshit y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:08:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22036072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggierachael/pseuds/maggierachael
Summary: He’d seen a lot of things on drug busts. Pet alligators, apartments so dingy they had holes in the floor, more than one thing he wanted to scrub permanently from his memory. But never, upon rolling out of his bed in the middle of the night, did he expect to be greeted with a crying baby in the middle of a call.Or: Dyn comes upon salvation in the oddest of places.
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Cara Dune & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Series: little and broken (but still good) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1617601
Comments: 53
Kudos: 457





	1. burn me clean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do my own stunts and my own saving,  
> But there's something amiss  
> Something I been missing maybe maybe...  
> They say there's good grief  
> But how can you tell it from the bad?
> 
> -Dessa, "Good Grief"

The warehouse was fucking freezing. 

Dyn hadn’t expected an abandoned harbor warehouse in February to be warm and toasty, but the coating of frost covering the metal around him wasn’t exactly a great omen for how he expected tonight to go. Seattle in winter already sucked, and getting called out of bed at two in the morning for an impromptu drug bust only made the level of (figurative) ice in police detective Dyn Jarren’s veins worse. It wasn’t like he could tell Commissioner Karga to fuck off and roll back over in his bed, so there he was, standing in old combat boots and a surf shop hoodie over three layers of insulation as he picked through the broken remains of what used to be an oil processing plant. Not exactly senior detective attire, but you do what you can to catch the bad guys. 

The floor was freezing too, even through his boots. Stepping gingerly on it as he picked his way through one of a number of identical-looking rooms felt like stepping on solid ice, fear of falling and all. There was so much shit covering the floors that he tripped on something with every other step in the pitch blackness despite the flashlight he held next to his gun. He, mercifully, was on backup, dealing only with whatever trouble the jackasses who were dealing decided to cause, not the jackasses themselves, but he didn’t exactly want to end up with a needle jammed into the bottom of his foot or a shard of dirty glass cutting his arm open. Then he’d really have a reason to tell Karga to go fuck himself. 

Not that he wasn’t doing that already, picking his way through the room and listening through his earpiece for any sign of danger. There was no way this couldn’t have waited until morning to deal with - and even if it couldn’t have, there was surely some cocksure young officer with limbs that weren’t starting to creak with old age who was better suited to pick through junkie-infested rubble while hoisting a gun like it was the head of a compass. Unfortunately, they weren’t who Seattle’s best police commissioner had on speed dial. 

_ Really ought to change my number one of these days. Just to spite him.  _

Obviously people had been squatting here before, Dyn thought as his sweep made its way toward the far wall. Maybe not living, but definitely dealing, and definitely getting up to some shit. Dyn wasn’t surprised - even with the city’s bustling commerce, these old warehouses were easy fodder for squatters, with the city too lazy to demolish them and nobody wanting to buy property that permanently smelled of oil and salmon guts. His foot collided with a worn out mattress every ten feet or so, and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what his coworkers were surrounded by in the adjacent rooms. 

To make things worse, the place was dead silent. Dyn hadn’t expected to hear much, what with concrete walls thicker than car bodies blocking out the sounds of the harbor around them, but it was oddly disconcerting. Usually these kinds of busts came coupled with the noise of occupation - mumbling, soft music, maybe a TV playing somewhere. But this warehouse was as silent as a funeral, and nothing put the fear of God into Dyn more than when he couldn’t hear if he was headed in the right direction. 

His feet continued to shuffle across the floor, the crackle of his teammates’ voices in his earpiece the only sign of life keeping his head in check. There wasn’t much to do as backup, given that he clearly had chosen the only room that didn’t house a single living thing (or at least, a single human thing), and all he could hope for was a clean scan that could give him an excuse to escape back to the cruiser and call it a quick and easy--

The sound didn’t so much startle Dyn, as much as it caused him to whip around so quickly that he nearly ended up with a sharp piece of wood jammed into his forearm. (Not his proudest moment, he’d admit that.) It came from behind him, a shuffling that most certainly indicated life and was about the first interesting thing that had happened to him all night. His initial thought was to blow it off as rats nesting in the building (or even raccoons), but given the context of the assignment, his nerves remained on edge as he froze, left foot gingerly placed beside a nasty-looking broken bottle. He waited, gun still lifted, for another sign of life in the dark, icy room, wondering whether he actually wanted something to happen or not. 

He’d very nearly decided that he was okay blowing it off as rats when he heard it again: a soft shuffling, like something was trying to settle down but couldn’t. It was louder this time, more pronounced, and luckily for Dyn, accompanied by—

Was that  _ crying _ ? 

Dyn’s muscles tensed immediately, freezing him in place as his eyes searched for the source of the sound. The paranoid half of him thought that it might be junkies trying to weed him out with some kind of recording, but it was too soft for that, and based on the profile he’d read in a haze on the way down to the docks, they were too stupid to do something that clever. He could easily be hallucinating, given the complete lack of sleep he was running on, but who hallucinates crying sounds on the job?

The sniffles sounded close, alternating with the shuffling noise that he’d heard until he could place where they were both coming from. They only got louder as his feet crunched over glass and dead leaves and twenty years of rotting debris, drawing him towards the corner of the room closest to him until he’d discovered the source. 

Fucking hell. The bastards had brought their baby with them to a drug deal.

The kid was stuffed in what looked like a dilapidated old crate, the swaddling around him clearly half-assed as he shivered amongst a pile of ratty fabric that Dyn supposed had once been blankets. He couldn’t be more than a year old, maybe even younger than that, and he was definitely crying — Dyn could see the tears in his big brown eyes before he’d even sidled up to the crate. He was as upset as a poor, helpless baby could be, and it stirred something deep in Dyn that he couldn’t quite identify as the boy stared up at him. 

He’d seen a lot of things on drug busts. Pet alligators, apartments so dingy they had holes in the floor, some of the  _ weirdest _ sex positions he’d ever seen. But never, upon rolling out of his bed in the middle of the night, did he expect to be greeted with a crying baby in the middle of a call. 

Academy training never exactly prepared Dyn for this. He could handle any kind of violence thrown at him, any kind of threat or gunshot like it was nothing. Fifteen years in the force had hardened him into one of the best cops Seattle had ever seen. He was practically invincible, and it certainly seemed that way to everyone he knew. 

But the face of a small, defenseless baby who’d been left to freeze by his parents stopped Dyn dead in his tracks like nothing else. 

There was no way the kid wasn’t inching toward hypothermia as they stared at each other. It was gone three in the morning, and almost definitely below freezing, and the kid was crying like he hadn’t been fed or changed in ages either. He was shivering so badly that Dyn could see it through the blankets. He was, for lack of a more powerful term, absolutely miserable. 

Dyn’s grip on his gun faltered as he leaned over the sad excuse for a crib the child was lying in. A god awful two o’clock wakeup call, a forty-minute drive down to the harbor, and more than one bout of swearing on the way in, and here he was: standing in a warehouse with a tiny, innocent face gazing up at him, imploring him for help by stretching two tiny, chubby arms in his direction. 

His first instinct was to put the gun away and answer that call for help. 

There was no protocol for finding a kid in a situation like this. Sure, he’d been on domestic abuse calls, and assignments with CPS, but those came with backup, people who knew how to handle kids and take care of them and tell Dyn when to back off and go take care of the real bad guys. He’d never been a fatherly guy - at thirty-eight and single, the closest he’d ever gotten to taking care of kids was the time he’d hung around with Cara while she was babysitting her nephews for the day. He was about the last person he’d pick to handle a poor, sick baby, as much as the sight pained him to see. 

So, he did the only thing he could think to do. 

The sound of the zipper on his hoodie pulling down was like a gunshot in the quiet space, and it might as well have been for the way Dyn felt as he reached out towards the baby and gathered it in his arms, abandoning his gun in favor of holding the boy close. He was shaking like  _ he  _ was the one who’d been left out in the cold all night, hoping the kid would trust him enough not to start shrieking. Not even the best academy training could’ve prepared him for a situation like this as he rocked the baby enough that it felt calm in his arms, before slowly and carefully tucking it into his hoodie, where he shivered as the kid’s tiny body curled up against his chest for warmth. 

Mercifully, there was no screaming, but it was an odd sensation, warm and cold at the same time. The feeling of something unnameable blooming in his chest mixed with the crack of his heart breaking as he heard the kid sniffle at the feeling of being warm for the first time in god knows how long. A small head buried itself in the crook of Dyn’s neck like it belonged there, and some unidentifiable intrusive thought told Dyn that it belonged there more than it did with whoever had left him to freeze. 

He could feel the kid grasping at the material of the outermost layer he was wearing, and no sooner had he zipped up the hoodie to cover the kid did he bust ass out of the warehouse as quickly as he could without ruining the operation for the rest of his teammates. It was no easy task, but the second he hit the wet pavement outside he was sprinting, arms cradled around his own chest as his feet carried him towards the squad car staked out in the shadows. 

His chest was sore from the effort of breathing in the freezing air by the time he yanked open the passenger door and tumbled into the seat inside. The driver wasn’t exactly thrilled about his Dukes of Hazzard-style entrance, and when Dyn recovered enough to think straight, he was greeted by a glare from his partner that could’ve cut through steel. 

“Jarren, what the fuck?” Cara’s voice was louder than was perhaps appropriate for the inside of a tiny Ford Explorer, and Dyn flinched at the sound of it as she turned to face him. “I thought you were supposed to be covering Paz and Corin."

He was, but that wasn’t the point.

“I need an ambulance right now.” 

Cara frowned. 

“Dyn, this isn’t funny.” Her voice was like the metal on the edge of a knife. “Did something happen, or are you just giving me--”

“Right fucking now, Cara.” 

He supposed that the only way to prove his point to one staunch Cara Dune, a woman who could probably get hit by a truck and not lose her balance, was to show her what he’d done. 

He unzipped the hoodie, calmly and carefully, until two big brown eyes poked out from the top of his collar to look at Cara. Mercifully, the crying had ceased, and the baby was now tucked into Dyn’s chest, little fists balled into the material of his flannel as his head snuggled itself right into the gap between his hidden Kevlar and his neck. He was still shivering, and Dyn subconsciously brought a hand up to rub against the kid’s back as Cara processed the sight before her. 

“Christ on a goddamn bike.”

The expression that crossed her face was about as close to shock as he’d ever seen on Cara, and perhaps the only reason that her eyes hadn’t completely bugged out of her head was to keep from scaring the shit out of the kid, who was still visibly upset. Dyn sighed, unable to do much but agree with her.

"On a fucking unicycle, more like.”

He continued to rub the kid’s back as he looked at his partner, then down at the tiny bundle on his chest. The boy was almost tragically small, the most fragile thing he’d ever seen in ten-odd years of police work. He barely weighed a thing as he sat on Dyn’s chest, and the detective could feel his heart slowly breaking as the boy adjusted himself under the jacket fabric still wrapped around him. 

“Yeah.” The word was strained coming out of Cara’s mouth, her hand moving to crank up the heat in the car to do what she could for the moment. Her eyes never left the kid’s. “I’ll get the ambulance.”

Dyn heard the words as his partner moved to radio for medical assistance, but he barely processed them as he stared at the kid sitting on his chest. Tiny brown eyes looked from Cara to him, and the hand moving up and down on the baby’s back stilled, frozen in place by the oddly perceptive look on its face. It was like he could read Dyn like a book, one of those older-than-his-years stares Dyn didn’t think a baby could have. 

“Don’t worry, kid.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say, hoping that the kid understood his intentions well enough. “I’ve got you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, welcome to "I was listening to Dessa and thinking of Dyn again, so here we are". Nothing quite like planning a whole modern AU in your head for weeks and then finally forcing yourself to sit down and write something after you've watched episode eight three times and are overwhelmed with emotions. (Thanks, Taika Waititi.) We love an awkward boy who's trying his best.


	2. like glass from sandy ground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Salvation doesn't always come down the path of least resistance. But Dyn is ready to work for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But I'm willing to work for this  
> Just show me where to dig  
> And I'm ready to hurt for this  
> I know exactly what this is
> 
> -Dessa, "Good Grief"

Dyn didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep at his desk until he nearly took a tumble onto the floor around eight. 

He’d been there for hours. The bust had ended about as unceremoniously as one could expect when he’d pulled a kid out of a rotting crate and radioed for help, and had closed out with him in the back of an ambulance, worn out hoodie still wrapped around the baby as the truck trundled its way on to Seattle General. The paperwork was stacked as high as his desk now, orders to fill out from practically every fucking department on the force to answer for what had gone down at the docks. Who’d’ve thought that rescuing a kid from freezing to death in a warehouse would piss off so many superiors. 

He’d gotten through the first two packets before his thoughts drifted off, spending even less time killing trees for bureaucracy than usual before his brain focused on something more important.. His mind forsook paperwork and Karga’s demands for a debrief, skipping down a different path in favor of the little bundle he had handed off to a bunch of hospital nurses just a few hours before. 

It hadn’t been an easy task, getting the kid examined for injuries. The first attempt at allowing anyone but Dyn to touch him had resulted in a shriek so loud it could’ve shattered glass, with all subsequent efforts only increasing its volume and shrillness. The baby clung to Dyn’s shirt like it was his only hope of survival, and it took the detective an extra thirty minutes in the back of the van to soothe him to sleep before he could be handed off to an EMT. It felt vaguely to Dyn like he was betraying the kid, handing him over to a complete stranger while he was asleep just to avoid more crying. But Dyn was a total stranger too, wasn’t he? 

Even still, he’d followed the paramedics all the way into the ER as they cradled the kid, flashing his badge even after he was told he could go no further to follow them all the way into the exam room. He stayed right by the boy’s side until a doctor assured him that the child had narrowly escaped hypothermia, and would recover quickly once they treated him for malnutrition. (His exhausted sigh of relief had surprised more than one nurse.) He stayed until the boy woke up, whimpering in his reluctance to stay with the men and women in the scary white coats in their scary white rooms. 

And Dyn had been just as reluctant to simply just hand him over after that. The kid was clearly scared, shivering out of fear now more than cold, and the idea of handing him over to some faceless pediatrician who would eventually pawn him off to one government official or another made his gut swirl like he’d had one too many shots of Patrón. He wanted to take the kid back, rock him back to sleep and whisper that he’d be okay until he actually knew for certain that that was the case. 

But by then, he was getting radio orders to report back to the station, and all he could do was take one last look back at those big brown eyes as he sidestepped out of the ER and made his way back to the car. 

What were they doing with him now? Was he being treated? Was he with other kids? Was he still crying? 

All those questions and more swirled through Dyn’s brain as he sat at his desk, and they continued to swirl in a violent hurricane of what he’d later admit was worry until his eyelids could no longer remain open. The events of the night were finally hitting him, compressing his ribs and rounding his back until gravity forced his head to his desk, glasses still perched on the end of his nose. He’d fallen asleep thinking about the kid’s big, perceptive eyes, and they’d haunted his dreams until his weight had shifted and he nearly fell out of his rolling chair two hours later. 

The tumble only served to make him even grumpier than he had been, and Cara swore she could visibly see a dark cloud hanging over his head when she arrived for her shift shortly after. 

“Jesus, you’re still here?”

The statement was thrown out with all the enthusiasm of a concerned older sister, and she’d perched herself on the corner of his desk and stared down at him before he could say anything to protest. She’d barely gotten any sleep herself, but this wasn’t the first time Dyn had forgone rest in favor of his job, and it made her sigh internally to see him staring off into the middle distance, the bag under his eyes dark enough to look like they’d been drawn on in marker. 

“You need some rest after that shitshow.” 

She leaned against his desk, her shadow crossing his face in the dim fluorescent lighting of the precinct. He barely reacted, but she continued to talk anyway. She’d gotten used to being the loud one in their relationship. 

“Go home,” she said firmly. “Get some sleep. I’ll take care of the paperwork. And Karga.” 

Dyn continued to stare past her, her gentle ribbing garnering absolutely no response. He was deep in his own head, lost in the labyrinthine tunnels of thoughts that only he could decipher. 

Cara sighed, patiently waiting for a response. She’d done it before, and she’d do it again, waiting for dyn.exe to reboot enough that her closest friend would be able to continue functioning like a normal human being and not like some kind of robot who’d been robbed of all humanity because of what he’d been through the night before. Dyn didn’t talk much, and she knew from past experience that it was better to wait than to push him for a response. 

“How difficult do you think it would be to adopt a kid?”

When his other shoe drops, Cara thought, it drops  _ hard _ . 

“Jarren, no.” 

Her frown materialized almost instantly. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what Dyn was referring to, and as perhaps the one person who knew him better than anyone, Cara could sniff out his severe levels of bullshit like any of the precinct’s best drug dogs. And rarely was his bullshit in such rare form as this. 

“You can’t do that.” 

There were few things that Cara ever argued with Dyn about, but adopting a child on impulse certainly had to be one of them. He wasn’t stupid - hell, he was the smartest person she knew. But he was also prone to rather... _ emotional  _ decision making, and the clear fact that he was running entirely on adrenaline and anxiety didn’t exactly make her feel any more confident in his logic. 

At her words, Dyn swiveled his head to glare at her, looking up at her for the first time since she’d entered their office. The movement was so quick, it nearly startled Cara, and the glare injected a lethal dose of worry into her heart. 

“I don’t think I asked for your permission.”

The words were taut, rough at the edges. Like he’d been crying. Had he? Cara couldn’t tell. And she wasn’t sure if he could tell either.

“I know you didn’t.” Her tone didn’t change, but she relaxed her shoulders a bit, leaning away from Dyn. “But that’s a big thing to spout off when you’re running on no sleep and a lot of adrenaline.” 

“I’ve done worse.” 

The exhausted, determined tone in his voice almost dared Cara to tell him no again. 

She locked eyes with him. He looked tired — more tired than she’d seen him in ages. His shoulders were slumped, and the thought of the kid they pulled from certain death was about the only thing keeping him awake. He was a hand’s breadth away from wasting away entirely, but Cara knew that look on his face. She could tell when Dyn Jarren had committed to something, and the look on his face told her she couldn’t have changed his mind if she tried. 

“You’re a hundred percent serious about this?” she asked. She didn’t want to admit it, but she knew she’d be the first one to cave. Arguing with Dyn was like arguing with a brick wall, and the least she could do was make sure that if he was going to dive headfirst into the pool, at least he’d have proper form. 

Dyn nodded. 

“As a heart attack.” 

There was that rough edge again, the hint that tears were brimming just behind Dyn’s eyes and he was powerless to stop it, stoic though he may be. Whether they were from emotion or exhaustion, Cara couldn’t be sure, but the sound of it tugged at the side of her that loved Dyn like a brother anyway. 

“That’s a bit intense for the situation.” She sighed, blowing a stray strand of hair out of her face. “I know finding him was a lot, and it’s been a long day, but this isn’t like adopting a dog, Dyn. You can’t just—“ 

“I’m aware of that, Cara.” 

His voice snaps like a gunshot, echoing in the cold air of the station. Cara barely pays heed to the recoil. 

“I know,” she said. “But I have to be sure. For your sake and for his.” 

She took a second to breathe, absorbing the fact that she’s actually talking to perpetual bachelor and self-professed loner Dyn Jarren about adopting a child. She’d assumed he would’ve voluntarily flung himself into the line of fire before letting this happen, and now here they were, with Dyn’s hand practically on the speed dial number for CPS. It was more than she expected for eight in the morning on a Sunday. 

“That kid deserves a family.” 

It’s a fact that neither of them are about to dispute. Dyn simply nods. 

“Yes.” He straightened in his chair, snapping to attention. His partner could practically see his determination straightening his spine. “With me.” 

Cara’s never seen him look so resolute about something as long as she’s known him.

And she’s known him a long fucking time. 

She sighed again. God knows what this would mean for her partner’s -- her friend’s -- future. She imagined long nights, lots of tears, maybe even losing the greatest partner she’d ever had to permanent paternity leave. The idea of Dyn adopting a child was something that her brain didn’t want to fully process, a possibility that had never been programmed into the Matrix, and the stress of it all nearly overwhelmed her by proxy. 

But sitting there, looking at the man she knew better than anyone else, she started to imagine other things amongst the hardships of single parenting. A warm house, filled with anything the kid could ever need. Enough love to fill a million hearts and then some. The kindest, bravest man she’d ever met doing as he always did, and putting everything he had into giving that baby a good life. 

Dyn Jarren was a good man, and if she had to put money on it, she’d bet he’d make an even better father. 

She pushed off his desk, rising to her full, muscular height. From this angle, Dyn looked small, a man shrunk down by exhaustion and the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders. He was resolute, but drained, and for half a second, it looked to her as if he wasn’t breathing. 

“If you’re really that sure,” she said, “I have a friend in CPS who might be able to help. I can send you her number.”

She paused again, this time for a good long while. Her eyes never left Dyn’s, the gesture somewhere between stubbornness and acknowledgement that she’d be there for him no matter the circumstance. She’d had his back a thousand times before, and this time was no exception. If this was the road they were going down, she’d be damn sure to be there with a spare tire and a lug wrench. 

“Be good to him, Jarren.” 

She didn’t need to say it, but something deep in Cara’s chest told her that she should - and Dyn appreciated it. To be frank, he was scared shitless. The idea of pivoting his life around to care for a child made him dizzy just thinking about it, and every instinct in him told him he wasn’t equipped to be a father. The fear of failure crept up his throat like invasive ivy, and all of his nerves were screaming to back down from his decision and continue on with life as usual.

But nothing was scarier than the idea of leaving that kid to the mercy of a system he knew far too much about. And for that, he’d work harder at this than anything he’d ever worked at in his life.

“I will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year y'all! I can't express how happy all of your positive comments on this story have made me, and of course I couldn't just leave y'all with that first chapter's ending without resolving it! I have definite plans to continue these adventures of Dyn and his new baby (feat. Vodka Aunt of the Year Cara Dune) in the new year - I have a lot of ideas in mind. I'm not sure if I'll continue them in this particular piece, or just jam them all together in a broader collection of works, so stay tuned!


	3. melt me down, recast me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din has a minor crisis. Cara continues to drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time has a funny kind of violence,   
> and I'm tryna keep in mind  
> it can't leave you the way it finds you  
> Good grief, I've heard people say it;  
> what a phrase, what a state to be in  
> But I don't know where they go   
> to get that feeling
> 
> -Dessa, “Good Grief”

The kid was coming home tomorrow. 

The kid was coming home tomorrow, and Din was still awake at midnight, in his apartment that vaguely resembled something out of  _ Candyman, _ light green crib parts strewn across his spare room like a bomb had gone off. 

“You’re sure that’s the piece that goes in here?” 

Din liked to think he was good with his hands, but he hadn’t so much as put together a birdhouse since he’d graduated from college, much less something meant to hold a human. The task of putting together said thing was only more daunting when he’d had about three beers and Cara had been heckling him for the last thirty minutes about picking the most convoluted contraption possible when it came to child safety, so needless to say, he was a bit stressed. 

He pointed with what he hoped was the right tool at the wood his partner was holding, a small slatted piece that could’ve been a support beam or a decorative piece of nonsense. He had no idea. And clearly, neither did Cara. 

“It’s either that or some poor Swedish guy misplaced a piece of his house’s new siding.” 

She shrugged and tossed it over to him, where was sitting with one side of the crib balanced on his lap while he tried to read instructions in a font much too small for his ageing eyes. His ass was starting to hurt from the hard wood of his living room floor. He’d never bothered to spring for a rug, and he cursed that decision silently as he tried to decipher the labyrinthine maze that was the crib’s construction manual before his muscles would freeze in their current position. 

Admittedly, he probably should’ve done this sooner, but with three weeks of back to back night shifts and enough paperwork to fill an entire filing cabinet, he’d barely had time to take a shower, much less prepare his tiny, dark apartment for a child. (He was lucky he had Cara, or else he’d still be living in a shitty Airstream near Alki Beach like he was when he met her.) He’d spent the last week working halved shifts, spending every available second he could with his nose in baby books or with his eyes glued to the computer, watching hours upon hours of videos on how to babyproof an apartment. 

His place was barely fit for a child, all sharp angles and furniture barely used since he’d moved in six years ago. There wasn’t enough room in the “master” bedroom for a crib (there was barely enough for a bed), so his spare room had been converted into a makeshift nursery, the mattress that only a very drunk Cara ever slept on pawned off in favor of a playpen from Target, an old rocking chair, and the IKEA-produced disaster of a crib they were currently trying to construct. 

(Getting the damn thing home hadn’t been easy either. Din had nearly strained his back trying to get one of the flat pallets off the shelf, ending in Cara driving them home while she called him an old man for ten straight miles. She was never going to let him live it down.)

It was all so much for him, even sitting on the floor with his partner while they traded beers and horror stories from the week. There was still a hundred things he had to do before he met with the doctors the next morning, and the fact that he was actually going through with it was still settling in his brain. He’d gone through with the adoption proceedings without thinking, blindly filling out forms and making phone calls in a haze to assure that he could be legally made the boy’s guardian until the adoption could make it through the courts. It had taken more than a few favors from the commissioner and a little bit of fudging on his part to get the paperwork to go through, but more than a month and a half later and it was real. He was, for all intents and purposes, the boy’s father.

He had actually, for real, adopted a baby, and he couldn’t help but feeling he’d made a terrible mistake. 

The imminence of the situation was the only thing that cleared the haze of emotion he’d felt over the child and set the reality of life with a kid before him. It was going to be an aggressive amount of work, raising a baby from diapers. It was work he had no experience with, no training for as an only child who’d had a less than pleasant introduction to the real world at quite a young age. It was a Herculean task, one that set a sordid fear in the back of his mind, like a shadowy figure from a horror film lurking in the corner, waiting for its moment. It crawled up the back of his throat like bile, no matter how many beers he had to wash it down, and it washed to the forefront every fear that had pricked at Din’s skin since he’d agreed to take the child. 

He was getting old. He worked a job with ridiculous hours. He’d been single for the better part of fifteen years, and certainly didn’t have a woman in his life that could be a mother to the kid. (And he wasn’t about to trust Ms. Cara “Beer Shotgun Champion of 2019” Dune with those responsibilities either.) He lived in a tiny apartment, on the far side of town, with almost no knowledge of how to take care of a child beyond changing their diapers a few times a day. What made him think he was qualified to adopt a child? 

Sure, the boy seemed to like him, and there was no doubt in Din’s mind that he deserved a safe place to call home, but who was he to call himself a father? He could barely take care of himself, let alone another human being. Let alone another human being who relied on him to survive. There was a reason he hadn’t ever adopted pets. 

“I’m not ready for this.” 

The words come as a shock to Cara, who’s busy fiddling with two pieces that look like they go together, but may well have absolutely no relation whatsoever. She lifted her head to look at Din, whose eyes suddenly shone with a light that looked foreign to him, but that she recognized all too well. 

“Aw, come on Jarren.” She tried to keep her voice light, the aural equivalent of stepping lightly around a sleeping dog. “It’s just a little side panel. You can do it.” 

Din frowned, clearly not amused at her attempts to distract him from the crisis he was clearly having. 

“You know what I mean.” 

Cara matched his frown. She was not letting him dig himself into a ditch when he had a kid to pick up in twelve hours. 

“I’m not sure I do.” 

Din grunted, a distinctly male noise that meant he had no idea how to vocally vent whatever was on his mind. It was an endlessly frustrating noise to Cara, even though she herself had never been great with words. So, she waited, plenty stubborn enough to do so until she could tease out exactly what was bothering her friend. It was like a cowboy’s midday showdown, only with guns replaced by hand tools. 

“The house,” her partner finally spat out, a dim shadow of an explanation. He gestured around the room with one arm, at the shadowy tenement filled with boxes and pieces of wood and the occasional trinket that proved that somebody actually lived there. “I can’t raise a kid like this.”

Cara had a feeling he was referring to more than just the apartment.

“People have done worse.” 

She shrugged, her answer honest and open. She and Din had both come from rather... _ undesirable  _ backgrounds, if she was using the term that she’d heard from the yoga pants-wearing trophy mommies at the park where she took her dogs. They knew what shitty houses looked like. They knew what grim circumstances were. And Din’s apartment, despite the fact that it was small and he probably needed to sweep a bit, was nowhere near that. 

“Most people have at least six months to prepare for a baby,” she said. “You barely had six days.” 

Din sighed, shifting himself enough to set the half-constructed crib on the floor with a  _ thunk.  _ He didn’t look any more pleased than before. 

“Great pep talk,” he replied. 

Cara rolled her eyes. 

“You’re damn right.” 

She picked up her bottle of the pretentious craft beer Din had haphazardly grabbed from the store on the way home and sighed herself. It was clear that her friend still felt like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, despite the fact that he had more than a few people willing to share the load with him. She felt for him; it couldn’t be easy, going from hard-working bachelor who never slept to the man who had to take six days off just to get used to the fact that he’d have a tiny human living in his house. Din was not one to make poorly thought-out choices, but he’d never done anything quite this big. 

“My point is, you don’t need to worry,” she said slowly. “The fact that you’re trying at all is more than enough. For him and for you.” 

She stared at him over the rim of her bottle, her posture rigid but her eyes as soft as the color of the cradle they were trying to piece together. Cara Dune was not a soft woman, and the fact that she was directing any kind of sensitivity at Din of all people sent a shock of fear down the base of his still-sore spine. 

“Why didn’t you talk me out of it?” 

His voice is small. Too small for a man of his age and size. It comes out sounding like he’d been dragged underwater, disconnected from reality as he stares from Cara, to the piece of crib still in her hand, then back to her face. It’s a disconcerting sound that he can’t believe came out of his own mouth. Cara, in all her mildly intoxicated glory, can’t believe it either. 

“I tried,” she said. “You yelled at me.” 

She gets an allen wrench thrown at her for that one. 

“Hey. First rule of parenting.” She lifted the wrench up to her face, pretending to examine it closely before looking back at her partner, who was now trying his hardest to etch permanent lines into his face by scowling. “No throwing shit.” 

She chucked the wrench right back at him. 

All levity aside though, she worried for Din. Yes, she’d initially tried to dissuade him from a possible bad decision. But the way she’d seen him talk about that kid, the way his eyes shone in a way she’d never quite seen before, had her convinced that there was no person in the world more destined for that baby than Din. Sure, he was a little worn around the edges, and his Kevlar and old, holey Fleetwood Mac shirts wouldn’t exactly match the acrylic nails and Lululemon of the playground moms, but he was smart. He was determined. And most importantly, he was kind. 

She didn’t know what had made him doubt himself, but she’d been his partner for almost ten years, and she wasn’t about to let him fall now. 

“That kid would love you if you lived in a cardboard box under a bridge.” Her voice dropped to the level of her partner’s, quiet in the darkness of the night. Anything louder felt wrong. “You’re trying, even if it’s hard and it sucks. And I’m sure it does. But you’re putting in the work, and that’s what matters. You’re going to be a good father, Din.” 

The silence that punctuated her words was deafening. Din’s jaw clenched, then unclenched. She was shuddering just slightly, shifting in place like he was an engine seconds away from losing its drive belt. Cara didn’t expect a response. She just hoped he’d take her words to heart.

“Well, maybe, if we ever get this fucking crib finished.” 

She reached across the floor to snatch the instructions from him, her face crunching into an exaggerated frown as the childish part of her tried to pull Din out of his funk. She didn’t expect him to spring immediately back into action like a cartoon, but she at least hoped she wouldn’t leave his place while he was still sulking. 

“God knows I’ve shared a bed with you, and I’d be pitying the kid ‘til he’s eighteen if he had to do that.” 

She looked up from the weird jumble of Swedish words for a brief moment. The hardened expression on Din’s face cracked like ice on the first day of spring at her words, the smallest of smiles creasing the crow’s feet around his eyes. It was a relief of a sight to Cara. Even on the best of days, Din barely smiled. He wasn’t the kind of guy to give that affection away without good reason, and to see it now made the light at the end of the tunnel shine just a bit brighter. It was going to be a long road ahead, filled with a lot of bumps and more than a few unfamiliar sights. But her steely resolve to stand by him was unfailing, and she knew that kid was going to have a good life, if Din had to fight tooth and nail for it to happen. 

Din Djarin was a good man, and he was going to be an even better father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y'all! This chapter's been a long time coming, I apologize for that. Life and the new year hit me outta nowhere, but we're here now! (And I've finally come round to the proper spelling of our boy's name. Only took me three weeks.) Thank you all so much for the wonderful comments you've left in the meantime - you have no idea how wonderfully happy they make me. For now, I think this is going to be the end of this particular piece, but keep an eye out for Din and his baby having even more adventures soon!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [snow in my pockets [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23348812) by [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/pseuds/blackglass)




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